“In about the last decade, one of the questions that I was so often asked in dealing with human trafficking was, does it really exist in Bucks County? And it does,” assistant county solicitor Chelsey Jackman said at a public meeting last week. Last Wednesday, in recognition of National Human Trafficking Awareness Month, Bucks County Commissioners adopted a series of new regulations that will make it harder for these businesses to operate and help investigators determine if illegal activity may be occurring. Nationally, that number stood closer to 9,000 in a dark industry whose revenue surpasses about $2.5 billion annually. The organization's report on illicit massage businesses in 2017 estimated that about 700 such businesses operate in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. The Polaris Project, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, cited statistics from The National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2017 that found about 3,000 of the more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking logged that year were tied to massage parlors. In recent years, small massage parlors have increasingly drawn law enforcement scrutiny as suspected hotbeds of prostitution and forced sex labor. The measure is the first of its kind by a county government in Pennsylvania. A new ordinance established in Bucks County this month will tighten regulations on massage parlors to deter illicit activity and uncover possible human trafficking.
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